The Garden Party, and Other Stories

Fifteen stories from the last three years of Katherine Mansfield's life: a bay at dawn, a garden party going forward while a carter lies dead at the bottom of the lane, a doll's house with a little lamp in it, two sisters who cannot decide anything now that their father is gone. She was dying of tuberculosis in France as she wrote them and knew it. Nothing is explained; the stories stop at the point where the reader understands. Sixty plates of sunset, twilight and ice by Monet, Lavery and others run alongside her last stories, matching the fading light in which Mansfield wrote.